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1 the Scottish-American Association, 1919–1923: a Study in Failure This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Edinburgh University Press in Journal of Scottish Historical Studies. The Version of Record is available online at: https://doi.org/10.3366/jshs.2019.0275. 1 The Scottish-American Association, 1919–1923: A Study in Failure Abstract: This article considers the history of the Scottish-American Association (SAA), an elite society founded in Edinburgh in 1919 in support of British-American friendship by Charles Saroléa, a Belgian diplomat and Professor of French at Edinburgh University. While the 1890s and 1900s had witnessed a rapprochement between the UK and the USA, a variety of tensions immediately after the First World War threatened to undermine the relationship between the two countries. These tensions were aggravated by anti-British sentiment in what has traditionally been regarded as an isolationist US. With the wider diplomatic context in mind, this article will consider the ways in which the SAA envisioned an international relationship between Scotland and the US that was both distinct from, and a contributor to, the relationship between the UK and the US. As such, this article will interpret the SAA’s planned aims and activities – which included public lectures and teaching American history in schools – as acts of unofficial public diplomacy. While the SAA provides evidence of a Scottish voice on the international stage, this article argues that the organisation’s failure to last more than four years is indicate of the inherent difficulties in trying to make this voice heard. The history of the SAA can be mapped onto the years of economic turmoil from 1921 and indicates both that the Association was a response to elite fears about the threat of Bolshevism and that its goal of a distinct Scottish contribution to Anglo-American relations was undermined by Scotland’s cultural status. The success of the SAA was also compromised by the personal foibles of Professor Saroléa. Not only were its Belgian founder’s motivations for becoming involved in UK-US relations ambiguous, but the SAA’s short existence is demonstrative of the irrelevance of Scottish culture in the era of inter-war ‘cultural internationalism.’ JSHS - The Scottish-American Association, 1919–1923: A Study in Failure 2 Introduction This is an article about failure. It is about the failure of a specific organisation – the Scottish- American Association (SAA), founded in 1919 but inactive by 1923 – to achieve its objectives, and the failure of the cultural tropes of the Scottish middle classes to find relevance or exert influence in post-First World War international society. The SAA was an unofficial organisation seeking to influence Anglo-American diplomatic relations through fostering cultural and intellectual linkages between Scotland and the United States by conducting what would now be termed public diplomacy activities, including educational programmes. Its failures are therefore instructive about both Scottish society in the immediate post-war years and the cultural underpinnings of the UK-US relationship. Crucially, this was the era of ‘cultural internationalism’ when, especially after the turmoil of the Great War, elite-led international actors increasingly felt that cultural relations between peoples were a means through which to secure future peace. In this way, the 1920s witnessed the beginnings of an ‘international society’ characterised by the efforts of organisations like the Pilgrims Society and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace to compensate for difficult state-state relations. The SAA was another such elite-led non-state actor, whose membership included the principals of each of Scotland’s four universities; the Lord Provost of Edinburgh; the chairman of Rangers Football Club, Sir John Ure Primrose; the editor of the Glasgow Herald, Sir Robert Bruce; the American Consul in Edinburgh; and the industrialist and former government Director of Munitions in Scotland, William Weir.1 In an age of anxiety when fears about social unrest exercised the minds of Europe’s and North America’s 1 J. Hart, Empire of Ideas: The Origins of Public Diplomacy and the Transformation of US Foreign Policy (Oxford, 2013); N. J. Cull, The Cold War and the United States Information Agency: American Propaganda and Public Diplomacy, 1945–1989 (Cambridge, 2008), p. xv; A. Iriye, The New Cambridge History of American Foreign Relations: The Globalizing of America, 1913–1945, Volume 3 (Cambridge, 2013), pp. 110–18; D. Gorman, The Emergence of International Society in the 1920s (Cambridge, 2012), p. 3, p. 183, and p. 211; S. Bowman, The Pilgrims Society and Public Diplomacy, 1895–1945 (Edinburgh, 2018); Edinburgh University Centre for Research Collections (hereafter EUCRC), Charles Saroléa Papers, File 175, ‘List of Names’, n.d., and Charles Saroléa to William Weir, 20 November 1919. JSHS - The Scottish-American Association, 1919–1923: A Study in Failure 3 middle and upper classes, the SAA’s founders were drawn towards the cause of British- American cooperation in the hope that it would provide a bulwark against destabilising influences in both Britain and the US.2 This article presents the SAA both as a manifestation of inter-war anxiety about cultural, social, and economic dislocation and as a casualty of that dislocation. It charts the history of the SAA and analyses in more detail the reasons for the organisation’s lack of success. The central argument here is that the root of the SAA’s demise lay in a set of contradictions. Just as social and economic tensions provided the reasons for the SAA’s rise and fall, so too did its relationship to cultural and racialist concepts like Anglo-Saxonism play a dual role in ensuring that the Association had only a short history. Though the inter-war years were indeed characterised by cultural internationalism, it did not necessarily follow that the SAA’s version of this cultural internationalism would succeed. This was especially true of any attempted connection with the US: as Andrew Hook has observed, American interest in Scottish culture, together with any clear understanding of a distinct Scottish identity, peaked in the eighteenth century so that ‘by the 1920s…any general awareness of Scottish culture had more or less disappeared from the American consciousness.’3 More widely, Scottish culture (especially one particular elite-led conception of Scottish culture, as this article will argue) and Scotland’s place in the world were fundamentally compromised come the inter- war years. This ‘relative cultural failure’, as Michael Fry has termed it, had already started in the years before the First World War, but the years after the conflict only continued the downward trend in Scottish self-confidence. Scottish political activists (including socialists like James Maxton and John Maclean) might sign the ‘Petition National de l’Ecosse pour 2 C. J. Nottingham, ‘Recasting Bourgeois Britain?: The British State in the Years Which Followed the First World War’, International Review of Social History, 31, 3 (1986), pp. 227–47. 3 Andrew Hook, From Goosecreek to Gandercleugh: Studies in Scottish-American Literary and Cultural History (East Linton, 1999), p. 3. JSHS - The Scottish-American Association, 1919–1923: A Study in Failure 4 obtenir sa Representation au Congress de la Paix’ calling for Scottish representation at the Paris peace conference, but the need for such a petition in the first place, and its failure, only served to underline Scotland’s peripheral place on the international stage. This cultural failure was concomitant with wider economic failures: after the short years of economic growth between 1919 and 1920 Scotland would experience recession and massive levels of out- migration peaking in 1923.4 In light of Scotland’s post-war malaise, and matching the short duration of the economic boom, the SAA for all its internationalist ambition was doomed to irrelevance by 1923, when it disappears from the historical record. The contradictions at the heart of Scottish society which served both to motivate and to undermine the work of the SAA were indicative of Scotland experiencing a heightened sense of its global clout alongside a simultaneous crisis in confidence. This much is shown by contemporaneous debates about Scottish devolution. Scottish home rule legislation in the UK Parliament had been derailed by the outbreak of the First World War and failed to achieve any further progress when the subject was debated again in the House of Commons in 1920. Speaking in favour of devolution, William Graham, MP for Edinburgh Central, described Scotland in 1920 as ‘failing’ and that Scots had been ‘denied systematically the free expression of our individual and national genius.’ It was argued that the outcome of this would ‘fall with greater effect not merely upon Scotland but also on that very large part of the world, including England, over which we have the honour to preside.’5 It was with such a belief in the need for a unique Scottish contribution on the global stage that the SAA was founded, just as the organisation’s failures were characteristic of the wider Scottish failures 4 M. Fry, A New Race of Men: Scotland, 1815–1914 (Edinburgh, 2013), p. 395; R. J. Finlay, ‘National Identity in Crisis: Politicians, Intellectuals and the “End of Scotland”, 1920–1939’, History, 79, 256 (1994), pp. 242–59; T. M. Devine, The Scottish Nation, 1700–2007 (London, 2006), p. 266; M. Harper and N. J. Evans, ‘Socio- economic dislocation and Inter-war Emigration to Canada and the United
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